Archives of Activism: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (2004, 11 mins)
I finally figured out how to upload to vimeo.com the video I made in 2004 about ALBA and the uses to which the archive was being put in the early 2000s.
Many of the details contained in the video are by now obsolete: the number of surviving veterans has dramatically declined since 2004; the size of the archives, in sad and indirect proportion, has substantially increased. But the core activities described in the film are still being carried out with gusto: graduate and undergraduate courses, the Bill Susman lectures, the George Watt student prizes, the website (and now blog) development, etc. Moreover, several new major outreach programs have been undertaken since 2004, such as the museum show and catalog “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War,” our public school outreach programs in four states, and the about-to-be-inaugurated “ALBA-Puffin Prize in Human Rights.”
I’d like to think that the currency/ obsolescence of the video is a testimony to the vibrancy of the organization and the archive.
View here:
Archives of Activism: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives
Archives of Activism from James Fernandez on Vimeo.
